User:Lizdahl44/sandbox

Structure of Article for Negative Evidence:

• Direct Negative Evidence
  • Definition
  • Examples of Direct Negative Evidence
    • Implicit Negative Evidence
    • Correction
  • Frequency of Evidence in Input
• Indirect Negative Evidence

**This is a tentative idea of what our article might look like... We may have to adjust our headings depending on what we find. but the bulk of what we will probably write is about the types of direct evidence and the way children have been shown to use direct evidence in the language learning process.

Direct/Implicit Negative Evidence Sources:

• Gathercole Hoff (2007)
• Rohde (1999); Rohde, D. T., & Plaut, D. C. (1999). Language Acquisition in the Absence of Explicit Negative Evidence: How Important Is Starting Small?. Cognition, 72(1), 67-109.
• Lust, ch 3
• Clark, A., & Lappin, S. (2013). Complexity in Language Acquisition. Topics In Cognitive Science, 5(1), 89-110. doi:10.1111/tops.12001
• Bowerman (1988)
• Chouinard Clark (2003) (PDF)
• Birjandi (2012)
• Saxton (2000) (PDF)
• McNeill, D. (1966) Developmental Psycholinguistics. in  The Genesis of Language, F. Smith and G. Miller (eds). MIT Press.
  • No link on EBSCO
  • https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED122625
• Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition. MIT Press. Ch1.
• Marcus, G. F. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition, 46(1), 53-85. (Rebekah)
• Chouinard, M. M., & Clark, E. V. (2003). Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of child language, 30, 637-669.
• Morgan, J. L., Bonamo, K. M., & Travis, L. L. (1995). Negative evidence on negative evidence. Developmental Psychology, 31(2), 180.
• Morgan, J. L., & Travis, L. L. (1989). Limits on negative information in language input. Journal of child language, 16(03), 531-552.
• Bohannon, J. N., & Stanowicz, L. B. (1988). The issue of negative evidence: Adult responses to children's language errors. Developmental psychology, 24(5), 684.
• Farrar, M. J. (1992). Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition. Developmental psychology, 28(1), 90.
• Gordon, P. (1990) Learnability and feedback. Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 217-220. (Rebekah)
• Bohannon, J.,B. MacWhinney & C. Snow (1990) No negative evidence revisited: Beyond learnability or who has to prove what to whom. Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 221-226.

Direct negative evidence

Definition

Negative evidence in language acquisition consists of evidence that can be heard in the input and demonstrates which linguistic constructions in a language are ungrammatical. Saxton (1997) asserts that negative evidence supplies the "correct adult model". Direct negative evidence differs from indirect negative evidence in that it is is explicitly presented to a language learner (e.g. a child might be corrected by a parent) whereas indirect negative evidence is inferred from the absence of ungrammatical utterances in a given language. Direct negative evidence can be further divided into explicit and implicit forms. Explicit forms of negative evidence involve a parent telling their child that an utterance was incorrect and then supplying the correct form, while implicit forms involve the reformulation of children's ungrammatical utterances. Though it is generally agreed upon that there is positive evidence (i.e. evidence that demonstrates grammatical linguistic constructions) in the language input, there is a lack of direct negative evidence in the general language learner input since most native speakers do not purposely produce ungrammatical speech.

Explicit Direct Negative Evidence in the Input

One of the difficulties surrounding language acquisition is that the language input is not rich enough for children to develop a correct grammar, otherwise referred to as the argument of the poverty of the stimulus. This is a commonly held position by nativists, who believe that there are innate mechanisms which facilitate language learning. The central idea of the poverty of the stimulus argument is that children could have multiple hypotheses about aspects of their grammar which are distinguishable only by direct negative evidence (or by hearing ungrammatical sentences and recognizing those sentences as ungrammatical). Supporters of the poverty of the stimulus argument then assert that because the negative evidence that is needed to learn language by the input alone does not exist, children cannot learn certain aspects of grammar from the input alone, and there must be some aspects of grammar which involve innate mechanisms.

The view that there is "no negative evidence" in the input is held by a number of researchers in the field of language acquisition who assert that if children are to learn language, then they must be able to learn language by solely examining the positive evidence that they do receive from the input since there is not enough negative evidence to be useful for language learning. Some propose that direct negative evidence would be necessary for children to develop a fully formed grammar, so it has also often been argued that children cannot learn a language by only receiving positive evidence, and that therefore there must be innate knowledge which would allow them to learn language.

Explicit evidence is severely limited in its existence in the input, and even when it is present in the input, it is unhelpful for children who are learning language. When parents correct their children, it is rare that children will correct themselves after hearing a parent's correction. This is demonstrated well in the following exchange between a parent and child which was recorded by David McNeill:

Child: Nobody don't like me.

Mother: No, say, "nobody likes me."

Child: Nobody don't like me.

[This exchange is repeated several times]

Mother: No, now listen carefully. Say, "Nobody likes me."

Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me.

Implicit Direct Negative Evidence in the Input

Implicit negative evidence is a type of corrective feedback in which parental responses to a child's incorrect statements is indicative of the utterance's ungrammaticality. Studies have been conducted that demonstrate that there is suitable implicit direct negative evidence present in parental responses to their children. There have been a number of studies regarding this type of evidence in which researchers have demonstrated that parents do respond differently when children utter grammatical or ungrammatical utterances.

Utility of Implicit Negative Evidence

Arguments for Implicit Negative Evidence

There are a number of applications of implicit direct negative evidence which parents utilize in responses to ungrammatical, though not necessarily incorrect or unintelligible utterances. Parents intend to correct their children with these corrective techniques. Recasts are one such kind of evidence, in which a parent "expands, deletes, permutes, or otherwise changes [a child's utterance] while maintaining significant overlap in meaning." Sometimes parents recast children's sentences after children produce ungrammatical utterances, and some believe that children use this evidence to correct mistakes in their grammar, even though recasts can also occur after children construct grammatical utterances. One theory for why the children even react to the negative feedback is that they trust the grammar judgements of adults. Given adults are older and more experienced with language, their word choice must be credible and that intended meaning children want to convey has to follow the language constraints imposed by those adults. Experiments have been conducted which have demonstrated that children improve in grammatical forms when parents provide them with any type of immediate implicit direct negative evidence, including recasts, which supports some scholars' claims that direct negative evidence does have an assocaible presence in learner's grammar. Similar studies have been conducted demonstrating that when parents recast children's morphological errors, children sometimes attempt to correct their initial errors. Such conclusions have received some as many such studies do not specify which types of utterances qualify as recasts and why children only pay attention to certain kinds of recasts and not others.

Chouinard conducted a follow up study in which she examined how children respond to parental reformulation (a type of negative evidence in which parents correct an ungrammatical utterance of a child), and she found that children are highly attentive to parental responses and that children respond to this kind of implicit correction in predictable ways. It is argued that parents frequently reformulate children's ungrammatical utterances, usually in an effort to clarify the child's meaning, though not all of the reformulations are intended to correct children's speech errors, such as cases where parents expand a child's utterance to seek additional information . Reformulations are in direct contrast to the child-utterance, which contained an error. The correction takes place in the same location as the error, thus providing the child with evidence for where they made an error. It is the presence of the reformulations as well as the high percentage of correct parental speech that allows children to learn. Children tend to directly respond to these reformulations by either affirming the reformulation or disagreeing with their parent if the parent misunderstood the child's intended meaning. As Levine's study demonstrates that children attend to even parental responses which are non-corrective, other researchers have also conducted studies that demonstrate that children do not need feedback which corrects grammatical errors in order to learn.

Arguments Against Implicit Negative Evidence

Though there have been a number of studies that support the hypothesis that children can use the implicit negative evidence that exists in the input, there have also been studies which stand in stark contrast to this hypothesis. Gary Marcus, argue that the implicit negative evidence in the input is insufficient for children to learn the correct grammar of their language. Marcus and others, such as Hendriks and Baker believes negative evidence is a weak form of evidence because children gradually learn from a limited corpus of correct or incorrect utterances that is grammatical or ungrammatical, which undermines the import of direct negative evidence to begin with. Children do not receive negative reactions for each of their negative utterances. There isn't enough of a correlation between negative evidence from parents to the occurrence of ungrammatical utterances from their children for infant learners to be able to base grammatically on negative evidence, as has been concluded in previous corpus studies.

Positive evidence from a parent can immediately be assumed to be grammatical, yet not every parents will correct every child error and some children may even benefit from fewer constraints, which diminishes the necessity of direct negative evidence. In spite of the inconsistencies of the negative evidence in the input, all children eventually arrive at a correct grammar which supports the fact that the negative evidence cannot account for a child's ability to learn a grammar since not all children receive the same negative evidence. To the contrary, Marcus states that the more positive evidence for irregular forms a child is exposed to the less likely they are to overgeneralize grammatical concepts. He explains this as a function of an inherent mechanism and the child can suppress the grammatical rule in cases where it does not apply. Finally, Marcus argues that a child can easily acquire grammatical rules, but cannot receive direct feedback from a parent in every case to determine where irregularities occur, thus making implicit negative evidence practically useless for a language learner.